i've gotten asks a few times on like 'how to do ''fantasy races'' without. like. just making race science true in the world'. and i think there's three approaches. the first is harkening back to tolkein and making it clear through framing device or format/tonal cues that you are writing in a mythic register--that you are writing about a world where the basic premises of positivism and empiricism simply aren't true. a world where 'biology' is like, not necessarily a salient premise--where there are things that just cannot be understood. (that's not to say that tolkein's orcs werent v. racialised in v. nasty ways--but it wasn't race science in the way a lot of more modern fantasy is.)
the second way i think is to go and actually understand the history of 'race' as a concept. 'race' has not always existed--it was an ideological invention birthed from / alongisde the enlightmenent and imposed onto populations through military force. in real life, it's less helpful to conceive of 'race' as an attribute someone has and and more as a relationship they have to society. so if you want to actually include scientific racism in your story as an element of your worldbuilding and not something decalred epistemologically true you should be thinking about why these people have been racialized and under what hegemonic paradigm--who, in-universe, invented & enforces the racial classification system that distinguishes between 'human' and 'orc' as taxonomic characters?
the third and final way is to simply think of the traits you understand as belonging to ''fantasy races'' (say, pointy ears and exceptional nimbleness and hundred-year lifespans for elves) as instead just being... more variations in the way people can be. like, in the real world, we do not consider 'tall people' or 'blonde people' or 'myopic people' a different species. in a world where sometimes people have wings or pointed ears or green skin, why should that be different? you've just introduced new types of variation within the population of people--you've just expanded the meaning of human. and of course, right, you can still roughly group these features, or note that some of them are more frequent in some ethnic groups--in much the same way as saying 'on average, people in sweden are taller, paler, and more likely to be blonde and blue-eyed', you can say 'people in these forests tend to be shorter and live longer and have pointed ears'--without having a hard taxonomy that classifies all these attributes as metaphysically different Types Of Person
obviously these are all very different approaches--and there are probably other ways to handle this too! i just get this question a lot whenever i do Orc Discourse and finally felt like getting these thoughts out. there are so so so many places we can take fantasy--let's move the horizon beyond 'magical race science' and imagine genuinely new worlds
